Israel's Other TempleAfter an opening that introduces Aharon ben Ab-Chisda ben Yaacob, the current high priest of the Samaritans, we come to the following:
Research Reveals Ancient Struggle over Holy Land Supremacy
By Matthias Schulz
Once in the MajorityPresumably the "926 BC" refers to the split between the Kingdom of Judah and the Kingdom of Israel in the time of Solomon's son Rehoboam. At least according to the Deuteronomistic History (Dtr), that "biblical tale" that "the Jewish people wove" which also tells us the "total nonsense" about the First Temple (see below). But that is not mentioned here. Nor is the fact that Dtr also tells us that David and then Solomon ruled over a united kingdom which was also called "Israel" and before that Dtr (along with its foundation document, the book of Deuteronony) tells us that Moses led the Israelites to the promised land (Palestine) where they founded a state also called Israel. Indeed, by calling the northern kingdom "the state of Israel," and saying it was "founded," the author leads the reader to believe that the real kingdom of Israel was founded ex nihilo in the tenth century by the northern tribes, an idea that would have abhorrent to Dtr.
From a historical perspective, the Samaritans and the Jews have a common lineage. The Old Testament recounts that 10 of the 12 tribes in the region of Samaria founded the state of Israel in the year 926 BC. The two other clans lived farther south, in the mountainous region of Judah, with its capital Jerusalem (see map).
(In addition it is hard not to read the use of the charged term "state of Israel" as a dig at the modern Jewish state, implying that the original "state of Israel" was non-Judean. The article doesn't actually say this, but if it didn't mean to imply it, the wording should have been chosen more carefully.)
Now some or all of the story in the Dtr may or may not have happened, but the point is that this article is uncritically accepting the Dtr story when it fits the desired narrative, rephrasing it in subtly misleading political terms, and leaving out important information that doesn't fit the narrative.
In other words, the Samaritans were once in the majority. In ancient times, there were 300,000 of them -- perhaps even over a million. But their strictest law almost led to their downfall. It states: "None of you may settle outside the promised land."Much of this is correct, although there is a massive chronological leap between the first sentence and the second. The northern kingdom of Israel was more populous than the southern kingdom of Judah in the pre-exilic period. Population figures are not easy to work out in the Second Temple period, but Jews in Judea and in the Diaspora substantially outnumbered Samaritans. Incidentally, we know from inscriptions that there was also a not inconsiderable Samaritan diaspora in antiquity.
Skipping down:
"Actually there's only one main difference," he [Professor Stefan Schorch, University of Halle-Wittenberg in East Germany ] says. Among the Jews, Jerusalem is the world's religious epicenter, whereas for the Samaritans it's Mount Gerizim.We'll come back to this. It's more complicated than implied here. But on to the Samaritan Temple:
But which Torah is the original? Until recently, the generally accepted school of thought was as follows: In the fourth century BC, the Samaritans split off as a radical sect. In the Bible, they appear as outsiders and idol worshipers; they are evil. The parable of the "good Samaritan" (Luke 10:25-37) offers a rather atypical portrayal of a member of this sect.
The historian Titus Flavius Josephus, himself a Jew, mentions that the apostates erected a shrine "in all haste" in the year 330 BC, as a rather dilettantish attempt to emulate the Temple in Jerusalem.
Increasingly, though, it looks as though the Bible has handed down a distorted picture of history. Papyrus scrolls recovered from Qumran on the Dead Sea, as well as a fragment of the Bible that recently surfaced on the market for antiquities, necessitate a "complete reassessment," says Schorch.
Yet the most exciting indication of how history actually transpired has now been unearthed by Yitzhak Magen. Working behind security fences, the archaeologist has been digging on the windswept summit of Mount Gerizim.Not sure what the last sentence means or how the author of the Spiegel article knows it. Perhaps it is an intepretation of Ezra 3:12, which implies that the Second Temple was less grand than the first, but hardly that it was "but a simple structure."
His findings, which have only been partially published, are a virtual sensation: As early as 2,500 years ago, the mountain was already crowned with a huge, dazzling shrine, surrounded by a 96 by 98-meter (315 by 321-foot) enclosure. The wall had six-chamber gates with colossal wooden doors.
At the time, the Temple of Jerusalem was, at most, but a simple structure.
Magen has discovered 400,000 bone remains from sacrificial animals. Inscriptions identify the site as the "House of the Lord." A silver ring is adorned with the tetragrammaton YHWH, which stands for Yahweh.It is exceedingly interesting to have so much new information on the Samaritan Temple, but it has always been known that there was such a temple. And it was not the only rival to the one in Jerusalem. There was also a Judean temple at Elephantine island in Egypt in the fifth century BCE and another replica of the Jerusalem Temple was built in Leontopolis in Egypt c. 150 BCE. Both, like the temples in Samaria and Jerusalem, were eventually destroyed. The Elephantine Temple has been excavated. Oh, and here is a recent book on the inscriptions recovered at Mt. Gerizim.
All of this means that a vast, rival place of worship stood only 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Jerusalem.
It is an astonishing discovery. A religious war was raging among the Israelites, and the nation was divided. The Jews had powerful cousins who were competing with them for religious leadership in the Holy Land. The dispute revolved around a central question: Which location deserved the honor of being the hearth and burnt offering site of God Almighty?
Skipping down again:
In the fifth book of Moses, the mountain summit finally earns a prominent place in biblical history: After the flight from Egypt, the Israelites wandered through the Sinai desert for 40 years. At last, they reached the Jordan River from the east. Their old and weary leader gazed across the river to the promised land, where "milk and honey flow."Now here we are getting ahead of ourselves. The Deuteronomy (or Exodus) fragment in question is unprovenanced and surfaced on the antiquities market just a few years ago. We do not know it was from Qumran. Equally or even more ancient scrolls have been found elsewhere in Palestine, including, significantly, Samaria. For reasons I have discussed here, here, and here, I would say the balance of probability is that the reading of the Masoretic Text, with the altar on Mt. Ebal, is original and (a different issue) the Deuteronomy/Exodus fragment with the readings found in the Samaritan Pentateuch is an ancient Samaritan manuscript and is probably not from Qumran. Schorch's theory is possible, but it should not by any means be presented as settled fact. The shoe may be on the other foot, with the Samaritan readings being propagandistic secondary alterations to the original text.
Shortly before his death, Moses issued an important command: The people must first travel to Mount Gerizim. He said that six tribes should climb it and proclaim blessings, while the other six tribes should proclaim curses from the top of nearby Mount Ebal. It was a kind of ritual taking possession of the promised land.
Finally, the prophet tells the Israelites to build a shrine "made of stones" on Mount Gerizim and coat it with "plaster." Indeed, he said, this is "the place that the Lord has chosen."
No Mention of a 'Chosen Place'
That, in any case, is what stands in the oldest Bible texts. They are brittle papyrus scrolls that were made over 2,000 years ago in Qumran, and have only recently been examined by experts.
In the Hebrew Bible, which Jerusalem's priests probably spent a good deal of time revising, everything suddenly sounds quite different. There is no longer any mention of a "chosen place."
The word "Gerizim" has also been removed from the crucial passage. Instead, the text states that the Yahweh altar was erected on "Ebal." "By naming the mountain of the curses," says Schorch, "they wanted to cast the entire tale in a negative light, and deprive Gerizim of its biblical legitimacy."
Schorch dates the intervention to around 150 BC. The researcher stops short of calling it fraud, though, preferring to label it an "adaptation of the Bible to their own religious view."
But why was this ruse ultimately successful? Why did the minority win out? Didn't the opponent have the more populous country? A palace already stood in their capital city, Samaria, in the year 1000 BC. Ivory has been found there. At the time, Jerusalem was still little more than a village, with barely 1,500 inhabitants.The status of Jerusalem in the tenth century BCE is hotly debated among archaeologists. Again, the article gives one position in the controversy as though it were settled fact. For the other position see, for example, here. I am not an archaeologist and I have no opinion on this myself, but where experts disagree, dogmatism is unwarranted.
As for Samaria, it was made into a royal city by Omri in the ninth century BCE, not the tenth. And our source for that information is again Dtr (1 Kgs 17:24), although in this case the palace has been excavated as well. Some background is here and here.
Researchers have solved this puzzle, and the answer even has a face: It sports a curly beard and wears a bronze helmet. Starting in the year 732 BC, the Assyrians used their chariots to advance to the Mediterranean and subjugate the state of Israel. The inhabitants were either impaled or taken into captivity.Wait a minute. The success of a Judean propagandistic alteration to a text in the second century BCE hinged on the Assyrian conquest of Samaria in the eighth century BCE? That's quite a leap.
This devastated the country. The land of the Lord had been overrun by violent hordes. Many fled to their cousins in Judah. Jerusalem's population soared to 15,000.
Drinking and Whoring HeathensOn the one hand, I think everyone would agree that the account of Solomon in 1 Kings 1-11 is exaggerated (with the Chronicler making the story even better later on), including the account of the building of the Temple. But on the other hand, the Aramaic Tel Dan inscription gives us evidence that the Arameans knew of a Davidic dynasty to the south by the late ninth century BCE, so a historical Solomon is at least plausible. (Efforts to claim that byt dwd means something other than "the house of David," or to argue that this scientifically excavated inscription is a forgery, are unconvincing.)
Strengthened by this influx, the priests there decided it was time for them to play the leading role in religious matters. Only a few years after the invasion, King Hezekiah persuaded all Israelites -- Jews and Samaritans alike -- to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He said this was the only place that still retained the freedom and purity to worship the Almighty. The neighboring country was, of course, occupied by drinking and whoring heathens.
To underscore their claim, the Jewish people wove an entire biblical tale around their small, southern kingdom. According to this story, around 1000 BC the biblical King David ruled from Jerusalem over a glorious kingdom. His son Solomon allegedly built in the city a temple made of cedar, "completely overlaid with gold." According to the Bible, over 180,000 workers toiled to build it.
Total nonsense: Not a single shred of archaeological evidence has ever been found to confirm the existence of Solomon's Temple.
Whether or not Solomon's Temple was as grand as presented in 1 Kings (I agree, it wasn't) is a side issue. Indeed, whether Solomon himself built a temple is a side issue in this context. The important point is that a royal shrine to YHWH was founded on the Temple Mount in the Iron Age II. We could have guessed this from first principles without any positive evidence, because that is what royal dynasties did. They built temples for their sponsoring gods, usually in the royal city. The fact that there is extensive literary evidence for the First Temple simply confirms what we would have guessed. And considering that the Babylonians destroyed this temple in 586/87 BCE, that it was rebuilt about fifty years later, that Herod extensively refurbished it (amounting to tearing it down and rebuilding it again) in the first century BCE, that the Romans destroyed this temple in 70 CE, and that at present the Waqf will not allow serious scientific excavation of the site (nor should they at this point), and it is hardly a surprise that we don't have much in the way of archaeological evidence for the First Temple. The Temple Mount Sifting Project has recovered artifacts from the site going back to the tenth century BCE (see here and here with endless links), which indicates that someone was doing something there at that time. I have presented the positive evidence for the existence of the First Temple here.
The goal of the deception was clear, though: Judah's priests sought to magnify the glory of their own city. And they passed up no opportunity to vilify their rivals: In the Bible the Samaritans were nearly always portrayed as unsavory characters. They were also said to be ethnically impure because their blood had supposedly been mixed with that of foreign colonialists.Annoyingly, this article makes lots of assertions about what the Bible says, without giving any references. The book of Ezra does indeed have a very negative view of the local inhabitants of the region who were not returned exiles, including the Samaritans, (see, e.g., Ezra 4) but it does not inaccurately claim that the Samaritans did not have their own temple.
The book of Ezra even recounts that these "enemies" tried to hinder the reconstruction of the destroyed Temple of Jerusalem -- out of pure envy, because they didn't have one of their own.
In reality, though, at that time, a shining divine fortress had already stood for many years on Mount Gerizim. Magen, the archaeologist, has discovered jewelry, silver, a fine cosmetics set and a small golden bell from the splendid robe of a high priest.Has a golden bell from the robe of a high priest actually been found at the site of the Samaritan Temple? This sounds suspiciously like the recent discovery of such a golden bell in a drain in Jerusalem (although I have registered doubts that it has anything to do with a high priest). Can someone confirm (or otherwise) that there was such a discovery also at Samaria? I am dubious. If this were true, I would think that it would have been mentioned when the Jerusalem bell was found.
The article bases itself on some of Stefan Schorch's good and interesting work. Joseph Lauer has collected information on this work in an e-mail which I take the liberty of quoting:
Dr. Stefan Schorch's thesis is fleshed out in his chapter "The Samaritan Version of Deuteronomy and the Origin of Deuteronomy", in József Zsengellér (ed.), Samaria, Samarians, and Samaritans: Proceedings of the 7th International conference of the Société d’Études Samaritaines, Papa (Hungary). Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2011 (Studia Samaritana; 6), 23-37; which may be read atThere is some interesting and useful material in the Spiegel article, but it's a pity that particular views are given as consensus positions when they are actually highly debated, and that the overall picture is slanted toward a biblical-minimalist viewpoint—and beyond—instead of being presented in a balanced way. If the intention is somehow to support the Samaritans, it is misplaced. They don't need that kind of help.
http://www.schorch.at/SchorchSt2011_The_Samaritan_Version_of_Deuteronomy.pdf
See also, among others, "The origin of the Samaritan community", in Linguistic and Oriental Studies from Poznan 7 (2005), 7–16, at
http://www.schorch.at/SchorchSt2005_The_Origin_of_the_Samaritan_Community.pdf
Further information about Dr. Schorch and his publications can be found at various sites, including
http://eurojewishstudies.org/scholar_shortdisplay.php?idscholar=40
Home page (German): http://www.schorch.at/index.html
Biography: (German): http://www.schorch.at/html/biographie.html
Publications: http://www.schorch.at/html/publikationen.html
The Samaritan Pentateuch: A Critical Editio Magna: http://www.schorch.at/html/samaritanus_english.html
http://www.theologie.uni-halle.de/nt/schorch/